


the saddest, most cut-open thing to ever exist

by arekiras



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Ableism, Autistic Corvo, Character Study, Gen, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Mute Corvo Attano, Selectively Mute Corvo Attano, like not explicitly but it’s my fanfic and I decide who is autistic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28662117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arekiras/pseuds/arekiras
Summary: “… a body as a sinkhole as a war wound as a poisoned animal as the saddest, most cut-open thing to ever exist.” -A Handbook of Disappointed Fate: ‘Woman Sitting at the Machine’ by Anne BoyerA study of Corvo and his many masks and cages.
Relationships: (mentioned) - Relationship, Corvo Attano & Emily Kaldwin, Corvo Attano & The Loyalists, Corvo Attano & The Outsider, Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	the saddest, most cut-open thing to ever exist

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for descriptions of ableism toward Corvo for being mute, including receiving very limited attempts to communicate with him by the Loyalists due to his use of sign, and allusions to violence during his time at Coldridge.
> 
> My dishonored blog is @transattano on tumblr pls come say hi

Corvo has never been a handsome man; handsomeness is not suited for the dark places Corvo has tended to dwell. Something about the thick shadows of forgotten corners and the stench of blood-pink gutter water will wring the handsomeness right out of a man. He’s all at odd angles, long limbs that childhood malnutrition had prevented him from growing into, hawkish nose twice broken, sharp face unsuited to gentle expressions. 

Jessamine had liked him, despite this.  _ Because _ of this. Any number of high born, square jawed men falling at her feet for even the chance at her affections, and she spent all of her time looking at Corvo, studying him like something to dissect. Something to eat. Euhorn had lamented once, with an edge of wry humor, that though Corvo was the Royal Protector, Jessamine was a panther holding him captive in her jaws like a bird. Corvo, birdlike, bristled at the word “captive”, for Jessamine had always held him gently. If he were closed between her sharp teeth, it was not with the intent to trap and crush. 

Emily mostly favored her mother in looks. They shared the same soft, round face, hair silken and fine instead of thick and waving like Corvo’s. Her eyes were his, sharp and such a dark brown they may as well have been black, greedily taking in the world around her. And in the summer, such as it was in gloomy Gristol, always bloomed into a warm tan at the first sign of sun instead of peeling and burning like Jessamine’s did. Corvo’s girl was not meant for clouds and shade, a secret flower stretching for every inch of sunlight it could find. 

In the end, however, Emily’s appearance didn’t matter. The princess could have been born blonde and blue eyed, and still the court would have been alight with gossip about what is considered to be the worst kept secret in all of Dunwall: the Lord Protector was doubtless her father. Perhaps it was a scandal, and perhaps it cast a shadow on Emily’s legitimacy, but there was nothing for it. Distancing himself from her, from both of the Kaldwin women, may have helped, but he couldn’t. Emily would call his name or hug his leg or simply look at him with her pleading little face and he’d be helpless to do anything but heed her every command. He didn’t have it in his heart to shun her, to maintain professional distance. 

If Jessamine had him in her jaws, then Emily had consumed him completely, until he was no longer only himself but her as well, kept alive by and for her. 

But the memory of a child’s smile is not the heartiest of sustenance, and by the time Corvo emerged from the sewers under Coldridge he was more akin to the hundreds of drowned rats down there with him than the nobility far above that milled among the Estate District and Dunwall Tower. His hair hung in matted snarls around his face, his body was one oozing injury. Lacerations, welts, burns and bruises made it hard for any of them at the Hound Pits to look at him, those first few days. When Callista asked him to save her uncle, she did not look him in the eye, shifting uneasily beneath his dark and unwavering gaze. She finished speaking and he gave her the barest approximation of a nod, and ignored her surprised expression. As if she expected him to be incapable of understanding, as if he were only an animal watching her make sounds and the way her pulse pattered along unevenly in her throat. 

It was known among the nobility that the Royal Protector did not speak, though it was speculated widely as to  _ why _ . He could hear and parse words just fine, and those who were close enough to the empress to know such things claimed that he did have a voice, but he spoke only with hand signs. Those who lived in Dunwall Tower had mostly learned Gristolian Sign Language over the years of his service, at Jessamine’s steely eyed insistence, but once he was taken to Coldridge, no one there understood him. The voice he had was taken away, and was one of the only things that the Loyalists did not see to it that he recovered. Samuel knew scraps of Sign and Piero’s understanding was middling, but the others knew none and did little to learn. 

His first meeting with Pendleton and Havelock was stilted and awkward, the both of them speaking at him instead of to him and then dismissing him just as quickly. Havelock slid a small leather journal and wooden pencil, the kind children practice their letters with, across the bar to him and then clapped him on the shoulder in an imitation of camaraderie. Corvo took the journal and both men ignored the way his entire body flinched in response to the unexpected contact. 

Six months ago he might have refused to write in it on principle, but Coldridge had done a number on him. There were no pens nor paper there, only shouted questions and brutal hands, beating him when he couldn’t answer them by speaking. This scrap, this minuscule effort to bridge the gap between him and the rest of the world, was welcome. 

The fact that the Loyalists only glanced through the words he composed as an afterthought, like adults gazing indulgently at a child’s drawing, was not. Still, a childhood in Serkonan poverty taught him much about weathering all the little indignities such as this, and though it smarted, he has certainly had worse. He kept the journal tucked in his inner breast pocket and continued to write. Dedicated his mind to the inevitable reunion with Emily, who, even in her flurry of excited words, always paused and waited for Corvo to answer. 

Dunwall changed immeasurably in the time Corvo was in prison. More checkpoints, more quarantine barrier walls, more watchmen. Walls of Light and Watchtowers sparking with power even as half the city is dark, rations on whale oil leaving the poor areas without power for months now. Streets Corvo walked as a watchman and Royal Protector were wholly unfamiliar to him, almost entirely empty after the sundown curfew, save for those souls with nowhere to go and those who didn’t pay any mind to such things. 

The mask acted as more than just a disguise, the cruelly smiling thing also behaving as a muzzle and horse blinders. Wearing it dulled something in Corvo, made him into a slinking secret thing drawn to a singular goal, numbed him to the greater atrocities occurring all around him. The lenses magnified his targets but also prevented him from seeing the poor huddled masses, or at least he could pretend that this was the case. Whether or not he saw the Flooded District and the rat swarms and the Weepers, the mask reminded him there was only one thing he could do about it, and that thing didn’t include deviating from the path to forge into the plague infested slums and wring his hands over the sick and dying. The man who wore the mask knew this, even if Corvo didn’t. 

The mask beheld these horrors and then released them, but Corvo found himself clutching them tight to his chest, ribs opening to accommodate them. Each night as he nursed Piero’s plague remedy and monitored himself for the first signs of a cough, his mind dwelt on the dark districts and destitute citizens. 

There was no one to share these thoughts with. The very idea of writing them down and asking one of the Loyalists to read them made him recoil, Samuel didn’t have the understanding of Sign required to be a true confidant, Piero didn’t have the sympathy, and Emily was ten. She had horrors enough of her own without Corvo forcing his own onto her. 

“How much can a man force reality to bend,” the Outsider said, seated in midair with nothing to support him but the Void, elbows on his knees so he can lean forward and study Corvo, “before he, and everything around him, shatters?” 

Corvo didn’t know why the Outsider brought him into the Void nearly every time he sleeps, to spout cryptid platitudes and rhetorical questions until he grew bored. Corvo, secretly (he was mostly confident the Outsider can’t actually read his mind), did not care. It is a sad man who would allow his conscience to be the plaything of a flippant god solely for the sake of back and forth conversation, but Corvo was indeed a sad, lonely man. For all the Outsider ignored what Corvo says, or picked it apart dispassionately, he  _ listened _ . He’s fluent in Gristolian and Serkonan Sign and watched Corvo speak with a singular intensity that was both disarming and comforting. He was being studied, weighed, examined under the microscope of the Outsider’s Void-black eyes, but he was not being judged. Corvo was aware of how backwards it was, but the Outsider has treated him with the most respect out of anyone he has interacted with since Jessamine died. 

“Am I the man?” Corvo asked. 

The Outsider shrugged with his whole body, shoulders to toes, flickering out of existence only to appear again a few feet above the smooth rocky shelf Corvo stood on, pacing back and forth as he often did. “You are a mask, you are a criminal, you are a father, you are a caged animal. How do you reconcile all of these? Something has to give.” 

Corvo sighed. “Something always does. Maybe this whole ordeal will be over with before anything reaches the breaking point.” 

The Outsider has never laughed, or even smiled, but he displayed his wry amusement in the posture of his back and at the edges of his expression. His eyebrows twitched and his jaw flexed. “Corvo,” he said indulgently, “When has that ever been the case?” He must have sensed Corvo’s flash of irritation, or else Corvo was just not as good at controlling his facial expressions as he thought, because he woke in his bed to the bloody pink dawn moments later. 

Back to being a mask, criminal, father, and caged animal. Sent out into the world to do dark and ugly bidding before being reeled back in like an obedient hound, the vicious tuck-tailed kind following the heels of the Overseers. The thought made an ugly feeling crackle down Corvo’s spine and into his hands, but there was nothing to be done. 

The late Emperor Euhorn’s words came back to him, then, and for the first time, Corvo truly felt jaws latched around his throat, ready to bite down. He shook off the feeling of hot breath on his nape and the hungry eyes of the Loyalists. There was work to do that evening and he could hear Emily singing somewhere below him. 

That would have to be enough. 


End file.
